


Keep it under your hat

by Azzandra



Series: Raised By Jägers [2]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Drabble Collection, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-23 10:07:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2543654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles set in the universe of "It takes a village (or sometimes an army)".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Loophole

Mister Taramtut consulted the paper in his hand.

“Now, according to this schedule,” he said, “we have small arms training at the school range next Thursday.”

Several hands went up.

“No, you may not bring your own weapon,” Mister Taramtut said without looking from the paper.

All but one hand went down.

“And no,” Mister Taramtut continued, “you may not build your own on the spot, either.”

Agatha lowered her hand as well.


	2. Clank Uprising

“Mamma!” Agatha wailed, skidding to a halt at the infirmary door.

“Hoy! Vat iz it?” Gkika asked.

She was having a chat just outside the infirmary with Erbat, one of the Jägers banned from visiting because he tended to rile up the patients too much. He looked at Agatha too, curious and grinning.

Agatha grabbed Gkika’s hand.

“I messed up! I messed up bad! They won’t listen to me! I told them I was their creator and they had to obey and now they’re not listening to me anymore!” Agatha said, indignant as only a Spark could be.

Gkika smothered a laugh. At nine years of age, Agatha was still discovering some of the common mistakes Sparks tended to make.

“Hyu mean hyu leetle clenks?” Gkika asked. Agatha nodded quickly. “Vell, dun vorry, dis happen all de time. Ve help put dem down, yah?”

“But—” Agatha winced.

“How about hyu go ahead und help,” Gkika told Erbat, grinning, “vhile Hy gather op reinforcements?”

“It vill be my pleasure!” Erbat saluted.

“But…” Agatha tried again, as Erbat ushered her down the hall.

“Dun vorry, Miztress,” he told her cheerily, “ve help de Mazters vit diz kind of ting a lot. It happens to everyvun once or tvice. Or twenty-t’ree timez if hyu iz Valko Heterodyne.”

“But, um…”

“Good ting hyu clenks is teeny enuff to stomp on, yah?” Erbat said cheerfully, as he opened the door to Agatha’s room and swaggered in. “Ve haff dis solved in no—”

He stopped in his tracks when hundreds of tiny, glowing eyes turned on him, glaring malevolently. There were clanks covering every surface of the room, and they seemed in the process of building still others.

“I was going to say,” Agatha whispered from the doorway. “There’s a lot more of them now.”

Erbat very slowly stepped back and closed the door.

“Hy tink mebbe ve vait for reinforcements,” he said.


	3. Signs

“I bet Agatha’s a Heterodyne,” Petra confided in Ducky one day, during recess.

Ducky, who’d been busy scratching a caricature of Mister Taramtut into a corner of her desk using half a broken hairpin, looked up in surprise.

“Oh, come on, that’s not possible,” Ducky said. “She’s just a girl.”

“So?” Petra said, frowning.

“So even if she  _was_  a Heterodyne, she wouldn’t be friends with  _us_ ,” Ducky said.

Petra harrumphed.

“Speak for yourself,” she said coldly. “I, personally, consider myself _exactly_ the kind of person a Heterodyne would be friends with.”

“That kind of talk is why the kids from all the other classes are scared of us,” Ducky pointed out, returning her attention to her carving. She was adding little clouds of steam coming out of Mister Taramtut’s ears.

“Let’s not get off-topic,” Petra said. “What I mean is, there are signs.”

“What signs?” Ducky rolled her eyes.

The bell rang just then, and children started filing back into the classroom, returning from recess and slipping behind their desks quietly.

All except for Vasile Vasilovici, who was returned to his seat by a large seek-and-retrieve clank.

Agatha had built it for Mister Taramtut earlier in the year, to help him deal with wayward students. Mister Taramtut had burst into tears of joy the first time the clank returned from its mission and deposited a sour-faced Vasilovici onto the classroom floor like a sack of uncooperative potatoes. Truancy had been at an all-time low ever since.

“I’m just saying,” Petra said, as the clank returned to its corner and went in stand-by mode, “there  _are_ signs.”


	4. Par for the Course

“So what is it?” Petra asked.

“It's a harmonica,” Ducky replied, grinning wider than she had since her breakthrough started.

“No, I don't think so,” Petra said, hesitant to disagree with a nascent Spark but still unable to stop herself from arguing with Ducky.

The contraption had at least one part that looked like it had been component of a harmonica at some undefined point before passing through Ducky and Agatha's hands, but now it was mostly cables, whirring bits, coils of electricity, all of it attached at the nozzle of a bellows.

“I mean, could you play it?” Petra continued.

Ducky's grin faltered. She looked at the would-be harmonica thoughtfully, and then at Agatha.

“I guess technically--” Ducky started.

“It would be very loud,” Agatha said. “And the bellows is rigid so it would only play one note.”

“Oh, but if we detached the bellows and mounted it on a rotating platform--” Ducky said, getting worked up again.

“Ah yes, I see!”

“Hold on,” Petra flinched. “I didn't mean you had to redesign the thing, I haven't even seen what it does _now_.”

“Oh, you're lucky, then,” Agatha said. “We were about to test it!”

“Yes,” Petra said. “I figured as much by the large red X painted on the wall.”

The harmonica was aimed towards it, though it was unclear how Ducky and Agatha thought they could possibly miss a wall less than one meter away. Petra didn't ask, though. With Sparks, there was often the risk they'd tell you.

“Well, since Agatha was thinking about expanding the lab anyway,” Ducky explained, “we thought we'd use a wall she wouldn't miss.”

“Solid planning,” Petra said, not adding 'for two Sparks on a fugue'.

Agatha handed out earplugs, and they all retreated behind a bulky blast wall nearly at the other end of the lab. Petra briefly thought that maybe testing this kind of thing indoors was a bad idea, but didn't get to express this out loud before Agatha remotely activated the harmonica.

The shock wave felt like a kick to the chest. Though everything breakable or irreplaceable had been removed or strapped down in preparation, a worktable was still overturned in the ruckus.

The dust settled, eventually, and the girls emerged from cover to inspect the results. The wall now had a large hole in it, perfectly circular.

“Oh no, we should have made it door shaped,” Ducky said. “We can't fit a square door in a round hole, it's just going to be drafty!”

“Ducky, shush,” Agatha said, as she sent one of her little clanks through the hole to illuminate the way.

A foul smell, like dust and old decay, was wafting out of the hole.

“I think it's an old lab,” Agatha said, poking her head in. “A really old lab.”

“Okay,” Petra said, trying to peer over Agatha and Ducky's shoulder. “So what do you want to d-- oh, you're just. Going to crawl inside. Alright then. Inside the creepy old lab. Here we go. Best decision yet.”

Agatha set off several of her clanks, whichever ones were equipped with lanterns, to spread out around the room and illuminate their surroundings.

The lab was cluttered with tools and half-finished projects, so whoever left last had clearly only been intending to eventually return. The complexity of some of the items on display suggested _Heterodyne_ to Petra, who prided herself on having a good sense for these things (the sense in question being self-preservation.)

“The floor is sticky,” Ducky remarked.

“Maybe the lab was flooded when the sewers overflowed?” Petra suggested.

“Doesn't smell like sewer in here,” Ducky replied, scrunching her nose.

“Or maybe it's--” Agatha aimed a light at a series of objects along the wall.

Vats, by the looks of it. Formerly they might have been filled with something, but now they were empty, and the glass of the hatch doors shattered.

The three girls bristled, all at once, and looked to the floor. There was no telling what the substance was, but decontamination seemed like a great idea at the moment.

“And these were my favorite shoes,” moaned Petra. “Both of you get out, right now. I don't have to care about scuffs anymore, so I _will_ physically kick you out. Agatha, leave it-- no, don't take--”

Petra sighed as Agatha completely disregarded everything she was saying and swiped a notebook from a worktable.

Petra ushered them both out, and after a chemical shower, a few blood tests, and a rather unceremonious wall plugging, it was established that they probably wouldn't be suffering an agonizing and painful demise in the near future, or at least not because of anything contracted in the lab.

Agatha had settled at her workbench, absorbed in the notebook.

“I think this belonged to the Red Heterodyne,” Agatha said suddenly.

Ducky was fiddling with the harmonica again, but Petra, who'd been busy scrubbing her shoes clean of lab gunk, turned off the water and moved closer to peer at the notebook.

“Is that what it says?” Petra asked.

“Well, I don't know, the notes are encrypted,” Agatha admitted, a bit sheepish. “But the sketches are pretty clear.”

She turned the notebook around, and Petra was faced with detailed sketches of... some sort of weapon, as far as she could figure. The opposite page had an elaborate drawing of some sort of behemoth clank wielding it. Petra recognized that one, at least, from the history books.

“Oh. One of those Unseen Empire guys,” she said. “So then the other thing is a lava gun?”

“It's an _improved_ lava gun,” Agatha corrected, with some pride.

To many of the Heterodynes, enemies had been little more than whetstones, helping them become sharper and more dangerous. Mechanicsburg suffered many attacks over the centuries, but rarely from the same enemy multiple times; anyone with an ounce of sense learned that the Heterodynes took everything that was thrown at them, improved it, and then threw it right back a thousand times more terrifying than anything initially imagined.

The lava guns were one example. They'd been part of the town defenses ever since the Red Heterodyne returned from his campaign against the Unseen Empire.

“I could fix the lava cannons in town with this,” Agatha said, a gleam in her eye already.

“Um.”

“Improve them, actually.”

“Agatha--”

“Really, I could modify them enough that it wouldn't even look like they were fixed.” Agatha blinked before noticing Petra again. “I'm sorry, you were saying something?”

Petra calculated the odds of Agatha listening to her, came up with an unsatisfactory result, and shrugged.

“No, nothing. Should be fun,” Petra said, going back to scrubbing her shoes. Better to be along for the ride than run over in the mayhem.

 


End file.
